Buffalo Bills Super Bowl teams still ring in memory

I had a lucky start in this business. One of my first big jobs – 18 years ago – was covering the Buffalo Bills. It was 1994, I was a freshman at St. Bonaventure University, and this newspaper started a magazine called Bills Insider.

Jack Connors, who was (and is) Business First’s publisher, hired me as a freelance columnist and assigned me to work for Rick Maloney, then the editor of Bills Insider, and today the editor of this website.

I was 17 when I started, and it was a heady experience. During each of my four years in high school, the Bills made it to the Super Bowl. By my junior year of high school, I think, many of us fans didn’t wonder if the team would make to the Super Bowl, but only if they would win it.

So in the fall of 1994, when I converted from teen fan to young journalist, I was completely convinced that I’d be covering a Super Bowl team … and maybe even a Super Bowl winner.

It didn’t work out that way, of course, but I did get to cover the core members of those Super Bowl teams.

Some things truly don’t change with time. Tasker still matches insight with eloquence. (Not surprising, given his role as an analyst with CBS Sports.) Pike and Lingner (the latter of whom I’ve maintained close contact with over the years) are still regular guys who provide an honest and realistic perspective. I also had the chance to talk to two men – former safety Mark Kelo and former running back Kenneth Davis – who I never got to know as players.

As for Levy? I’ve kept in touch with him, but if you’re a Bills fan, there’s a good chance you have as well – at least through the media. Well into his 80s, the Hall of Fame coach has launched a career as a novelist and has been busy doing interviews, signings and book talks.

Still, it was cool to be able to have one more conversation with him about the greatest teams he coached.

Here’s a collection of tidbits – outtakes, if you will – that I didn’t have the space to share in the story:

• Kelso doesn’t dwell on losing four Super Bowls. That means he doesn’t sit around thinking about it, not even this time of year, when much of the world is focused on the big game. But it also means he avoids watching certain coverage. For example, some of the Bills’ old Super Bowl games are shown on cable networks. Friends will call him and say, “Hey, I just saw you make a big play on TV!” But Kelso has never watched one of those games from start to finish. Nor, when he watches the Super Bowl, does he keep the TV on long enough to see the Lombardi trophy celebration for the winner.

“I still can’t bear to watch the end of the game,” says Kelso, who is now the team’s radio analyst and works full time as the director of advancement for St. Mary’s High School in Lancaster. “We all have a great appreciation for the accomplishment, but it still stings that we weren’t able to bring that victory home for Western New York. It’s bittersweet knowing we were never able to taste that thrill of victory.”

• On that note, however, multiple guys told me that if the team had won one of the first three Super Bowls, the Bills likely wouldn’t have made it to four straight.

“If Scott Norwood’s kick had gone through those uprights,” said Steve Tasker, referring to the Bills’ first Super Bowl, “we wouldn’t have gone back to four straight.”

His thoughts were echoed by others, which actually surprised me. I get the concept of resilience, but I always took it as more of a poetic thing: The Bills lost the Super Bowl, but scraped up every bit of resolve to charge back even harder and push it again next year. Go get ‘em, boys!

Turns out it was real.

“Once you reach the top of the mountain,” Tasker said, “there’s no place to go but downhill. It would have been such a huge relief to win one that it would have been hard to dredge up the emotion again the next year

“Our resolve was to do it again. It created a culture that kept us going back.”

• For a lot of us who remember those teams, the players are locked in our mind as younger men in their 30s and 40s. Of course, they aren’t anymore. The core group of guys from those Super Bowl clubs are in the late 40s and early 50s now. They have kids in college – some of whom are following in their dads’ footsteps.

Mark Pike’s son Zeke, for example, is one of the top-rated high school quarterbacks in the nation. He recently graduated a half-year early from high school and is now at Auburn University, which was one of 50 schools that offered him a football scholarship.

“It’s been crazy,” Mark Pike told me, referring to the recruiting process and all the attention from traditional media, social media, and scouting services. “I had three scholarship offers in my senior year. He had 50 before his senior year.”

During the college search and recruiting process, Mark and Zeke hit the road for camps and college visits on both coasts and in the middle of the country. In their travels, they ran into other former Bills whose kids were going through a similar process: Eugene Marve, Jim Richter, Chris Mohr, and more.

• Former running back Kenneth Davis is now the athletic director at Bishop Dunne Catholic School in Dallas. When students discover what “Mr. Davis” used to do for a living, they’re mesmerized. And it gives Davis the opportunity to do a little teaching about sports and life and the virtues of never being completely satisfied.

Davis teaches the kids to “do your best, and don't worry about the rest.”

That much is common — who doesn’t teach kids to do their best?

But the next part is a little different: Davis also teaches them to never quite feel as if they have done their best — because how could you possibly know if you’ve maximized your potential?

“You don’t know what you’re best is,” Davis said. “It’s an unattainable goal, and one that will keep you afloat.”

• Here’s a lesson in confidence that we can all transfer to many aspects of life: When the Bills started scoring to chip away at 32-point second-half deficit during a 1993 wildcard game against the Houston Oilers, long snapper Adam Linger started doing some sideline math.

“I started counting on my fingers: how many more do we need?” he said. “I suspect a lot of other guys were doing the same.”

Lingner calls this mentality “an expectation that we were going to win.”’ Which of course, they did – with the greatest comeback in NFL history.